A recently released Pew study finds that while half of American adults play video games, only 10% consider themselves gamers. Moreover, the data demonstrate that men call themselves gamers at nearly twice the rate as women. As someone who has written quite a bit about gamer identity, neither of these facts are particularly surprising. In […]
Below is an excerpt from Casey O’Donnell’s book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014). – How to Play (Use) This Game (Book) – The structure of this book is performative. It imitates the level structure of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Super Mario Bros. (SMB) to highlight the importance that games and […]
Below is the preface to Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) In the late the 1980s, my mother, sister, and I lived in Japan for four years. Stationed on a military base, we received a steady stream of U.S. programming via the military […]
As a bookend to the podcast that T.L. Taylor and Greg Lastowka were kind enough to participate in, I’m posting this bit of thinking on the legal issues that continue to plague those of us thinking about cultural production in the digital age. It’s also a bit of an emerging dialogue. See Greg […]